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Posted by SarahBird

Longstanding insomnia sufferers, rejoice! My Moz 2015 Annual Report is here. Check out 2012, 2013, and 2014 if you’re a glutton for punishment.

So much happens in a year — fantastic and terrible things — distilling it into one blog post is my annual albatross.

Here’s me agonizing over what to write. It’s not always good to be king.

Alright. Enough wallowing in self pity.

Here’s how I’m organizing this post so you can jump around to whatever strikes your fancy:

Part 1: tl;dr 2015 was a strengthening year!

Part 2: Two 2015 strategic shifts

Part 3: Two invisible achievements

Part 4: The tough stuff

Part 5: Inside Moz HQ

Part 6: Performance (metrics vomit)

Part 7: The Series C and looking ahead

[Part 1]

tl;dr: 2015 was a strengthening year!

2015 was a strengthening year. We grew customers, revenue, and product offerings. We also began some major tech investments that will continue to pay off in the years ahead.

With all the product launches comes increased opportunity in 2016, and also increased complexity. In the year ahead, you’ll see Moz delivering much more personalized onboarding, re-working the brand to accommodate our product families, changing up our customer acquisition flow, and investing in technologies and practices to speed up product development.

[Part 2]

Two 2015 major strategic shifts

First, instead of a one-size-fits-all product, we’re offering many crafted customer experiences.

The most visible strategic change is the move away from cramming every feature into one product; instead, we’re offering products designed to help specific kinds of customers with their particular needs. Our community and customers are diverse. The solutions we offer should be too.

We started 2015 with Moz Pro, Moz Local and our API business. We’re ending the year with two new products under out belt, Moz Content and Followerwonk. Pro will continue to evolve in 2016 to focus on professional SEOs. Moz Local just launched a major upgrade to its offering, making it the most useful way to manage your local SEO. Content marketers will love Moz Content’s new features. And social fanatics will enjoy analyzing their followers and fans with Followerwonk.

Why did we back away from all-in-one? Well. We discovered that adding more features into a product isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s just more. We heard from customers that they valued certain parts of the product that solved their problem, but weren’t interested in the others.

More simply, we built one product that many different kinds of customers could get a little benefit from. Instead, we want to build many products that customers get a lot out of. Even more simply, we won’t give each of our customers identical plates of food with lots of small bites, only 30% of which each enjoys. We’re giving everyone a big plate of their favorite food. Yum.

Second, people sometimes really want to talk to other people. And that’s good.

We’ve also relaxed our religious fervor about keeping humans out of the sales and onboarding process. We prided ourselves for years on dogmatically proclaiming that only bad products need human intervention. “The product should sell itself and be obvious to use,” we insisted.

We [I] clung to this belief in the face of overwhelming feedback from our customers that they would love to have more interaction with Mozzers.

I’m finally ready to let go of my belief that wanting to speak with a human is a failure in the system. We should give our customers what they want. Guess what? They sometimes want sales people, and personal onboarding and training.

We will not resort to barfy tactics like high pressure sales, harassment, and limit self-service. But maybe, just maybe, the world isn’t so black and white as humans=bad, computers=good.

Expect more opportunities to engage with real, live, bona-fide Mozzers as part of your product experience, should you need us.

[Part 3]

Two invisible accomplishments

Not all of our big 2015 accomplishments are transparent to customers or the community. They’re important nonetheless.

The fance-pantsiest new engineering platform

We knew that to out-innovate our competitors and make marketing easier for our customers in this dynamic environment, we needed a step-function improvement in our ability to experiment and innovate.

We were inspired by compelling new development platforms built and tested at places like Google, Hubspot, and Twitter. They simplified the software development process without compromising security or performance.

RogerOS is our new engineering platform. It’s based on the Mesos kernel with a marathon wrapper. Moz Content was built 100% on it, so the two innovations incubated and launched together last year. More Moz services are starting to move to it.

In the spirit of generosity, we open sourced a big chunk of our work and look forward to contributing more in the future. We’ve still got a lot of work to do to make the platform more robust and we’ll continue these efforts in 2016.

The platform is poised to deliver the step function increase in innovation. Because a bigger, more complex Moz shouldn’t mean slower.

Kissing bad architecture goodbye

Technical debt is the worst. Ugh. It’s demotivating for the team and siphons cycles away from innovation. It’s hard on customers because feature delivery stalls when you’re keeping a fragile system from imploding.

Our Moz Pro product was hobbled with some serious tech debt. The team spent months trying to keep it up. Customers were disappointed and the team was tired. We needed a plan to fix it that didn’t involve a highly risky 18-month rebuild.

Luckily, one of our engineers had an epiphany, and a bunch of other engineers worked very hard to turn that epiphany into a workable plan that delivered feature improvements (not just parity!) while retiring painful tech debt in seven months. That’s way, way better than the dreaded 18 month slog.

We have massively transformed the backend architecture for Moz Analytics. This frees up cycles for innovation and unlocks a bunch of latent potential in the data. It feels like we were running a race in a cast and crutches, and now finally our leg is free! We’re throwing those crutches to the sideline and sprinting. Here we come!

[Part 4]

The tough stuff

Have you noticed how many year-in-review posts skip the tough stuff? I don’t want to do that. After all, a lot of this year’s tough stuff become next year’s strategic initiative.

The marketing software space is getting crowded. It’s no secret that companies need to transform their marketing to match the new ways people discover, engage, and buy.

The spigot of investor cash has been flowing fast and free into marketing tech for last couple years. We’re definitely seeing more competition in the market.

To our competitors: We Salute You!

You keep good pressure on us to innovate and deliver a great experience for good value.

Moz is ahead in some areas and lagging in others. We’ve struggled to keep our link data reliable and we have to play catch up on the size and quality of our index. We’ve been very weak on keyword research, and will be remedying that in 2016. Our customer acquisition flow and brand is also way more complicated than it was a mere two months ago. We’ll be investing heavily in optimizing and improving this experience so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

These challenges are non-trivial, and yet invigorating. We’ve got the best people on the planet at Moz and we’ve been making forward-thinking tech investments. It’s game on in 2016.

[Part 5]

Inside Moz HQ

Amidst all of the shifts and changes, some things remain constant.

TAGFEE remains our aspiration and our compass. As an organization, as people, we often have great integrity with our values. We also have moments of failure.

But what makes Moz special is not the absence of flaws, or the TAGFEE page on the website; it’s the genuine commitment to those values. The pursuit is relentless.

I don’t know anyone who is perfect. The people I admire most are those that strive for excellence when they fail; they pick themselves up and keep trying. They never give up the commitment to their values. Mozzers are like that.

We’ve got 192 Mozzers now, up from last year’s number of 149.

This year, we’ve done a lot of good work on teaching Mozzers learning about productive conflict, feedback, and inclusion in tech. We’re not done, but we’ve made an earnest start.

Our gender diversity numbers are still terrible, but at least we’re headed in the right direction. Overall, we’re 40% women, up from 37% last year. We’re up to 27% in engineering. 54% of non-engineering roles are women.

A lot of the work we’re doing to make the tech industry more inclusive doesn’t benefit Moz directly, but we’re still happy to do it. For example, we partner with lots of programs to bring middle and high school girls on tours of Moz HQ and encourage them to consider careers in STEM — maybe even start their own business someday. Several Moz engineers volunteer at coding schools, like ADA Academy, mentoring and welcoming underrepresented people to tech careers. We’re also partnering with Year Up to give underserved young adults meaningful careers.

Our charity match program continues to be one of my most proud parts of Moz. Last year we donated over $110k to charities that Mozzers are passionate about. We match every Mozzer donation 150%.

Our paid, PAID vacation program continues to be a high point for all Mozzers.

Last year, Moz spent over $400k on airfare, hotels, tours, food, boats, and life-changing, memory-making experiences for Mozzers.

That’s money well spent on lives well lived.

Lastly, we reached a milestone so wonderful, I’m having a hard time expressing how it makes me feel. Two Mozzers, who didn’t know each other when they started working here, fell in love and are getting married. We made a whole family!!!

[Part 6]

Performance (metrics vomit!)

2015 was a strong improvement over 2014 revenue growth rate. We finished the year at about ~$38 million in revenue. That’s a growth rate of 21.6%, compared to the 5.7% the year prior.

Moz Pro still drives the majority of revenue, and Moz Local has demonstrated impressive growth.

Product gross profit margin fared well this year at 76%. That’s basically holding steady from last year. If you throw non-product in there, overall gross profit margin is 73%.

Total Cost of Revenue (COR) went up a little bit from last year. Most of the cost driven by increases in the amounts we pay to our data aggregator partners for Moz Local. We expect this to grow even more in 2016 as Local becomes a bigger share of our product mix.

Total operating expenses came to $36.4 million dollars in 2015 (excluding CORs). The basic shape of that spend has remained pretty constant. The vast, vast majority of our company spend is people. No major shifts in spending trends from 2014 to 2015 other than increased 3rd Party Data.

As planned, our EBITDA loss increased from last year to -$3.1 million.

Cash burn was slightly above our 10% of revenue plan, but we were pretty darn close at 11%.

Adam shared a detailed reflection of changes and upgrades to Moz Pro in 2015. I encourage you to check it out. Those changes are attracting a slightly different customer. The number of new Moz Pro customers we’re acquiring is much lower than in previous years, but our average revenue per user is increasing. We’re also keeping customers longer. Obviously, we’d love to add tons of new Pro customers *and* increase Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). We’ll be putting energy into that in 2016.

Moz Local locations more than doubled in 2015. And we’re very excited to see how customers are enjoying the big Moz Local Insights release we released this week. It’s only been 24 hours, but initial response is very good.

Organic traffic grew in 2015 by 16.7%. We hit just shy of 16 million organic visits.

You can read a bunch about the community we host here on Moz.com from this post.

Our external communities continued to grow. We did, however, decide to stop investing in the LinkedIn group in 2015 in favor of Instagram.

[Part 7]

The Series C and looking ahead

I wrote last week about closing our Series C. (BTW, did you notice the public markets for SaaS companies nose-dived soon after? Phew! If you’re reading this, we love you Foundry!)

We made big investments and placed some big bets in 2015. It’s so exciting to see them start to bear fruit. In the next 12 months, you should see (1) more feature releases, (2) more personal interaction with the Moz team when buying and using our products, and (3) increased clarity on our brand and customer acquisition flows.

Thanks for sharing your feedback, sticking with us, and rooting for us. We’ll keep trying to make great stuff that helps you do your job better, and bring a smile to your day!

Okay. And that’s a wrap on your 2015 Annual Report. Peace out.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by adamf

2015 was very much a rebuilding year for Moz Pro. We entered last year with some core infrastructure problems, and so worked heavily on less visible projects to make our SEO software faster, more reliable, and more polished. Still, on top of everything, we were able to add a host of new features and make some major design improvements.

The great news for 2016? A lot of that core infrastructure work is done or near completion. With this foundation in place, we’re going to seriously level up key sections of Moz Pro, like rank tracking, keyword research, site audits, and crawls. Expect to see some of these improvements as soon as next week!

If you’re a Moz Pro customer, or just interested in where we’ve been and where we’re going with our SEO product (hint, hint, we offer a free trial if you’re curious), give this post a read. I’ll cover the following:

• Key updates from 2015
• Moz Pro’s renewed focus on SEO
• Some improvements in store for 2016

Key updates from 2015

Link data and analysis

Spam Score

This new metric helps SEOs identify spammy links for the purposes of assessing risky link profiles, performing link cleanup, and evaluating link targets. To learn all about Spam Score and how to apply it, check out Rand’s excellent Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

Spam Score is available in Open Site Explorer, the MozBar, and through our Mozscape API.

Spam Score in OSE

Spam Score in the MozBar

Link building opportunities

Finding high-value link targets is challenging work, so we added some powerful new features to Open Site Explorer early in 2015 to surface those hard-to-find opportunities that are most relevant for your site. You’ll find three views in the Link Opportunities section of OSE.

• Reclaim Links: Find pages with link equity that are broken or blocked
• Unlinked Mentions: Find fresh content that mentions your site or brand, but doesn’t link back to you
• Link Intersect: Find links that related or competitive sites have, but that you don’t

We now surface unlinked mentions in your campaigns, too!

The Mozscape index

I won’t sugarcoat it: it was a rough year for our link index. We ran into some infrastructure issues that led to delays, outages, and inconsistencies. The good news? We’ve added reinforcements to the team and the infrastructure to keep our core index running smoothly. We are dedicated to improving our index quality, stability, and consistency in 2016.

Keyword rankings

From mobile rankings to search visibility to a complete UX refresh, we made some significant updates to campaign rankings data in 2015.

Mobile rankings

Last year, Google made it no secret they would take mobile seriously. They added mobile friendliness to their ranking factors, so we added it to our rank tracking. You can now track mobile rankings for Google, compare them to desktop rankings, and see which pages Google considers mobile-friendly.

We also added an extra engine to all campaigns allowing you to collect mobile rankings for every keyword you already track! Effectively, we added 25% more rankings collections to your account for free!

Search Visibility

Along with mobile, we added a new way to understand your rankings—our new Search Visibility Score. You can easily see how visible your ranking pages are across all of the keywords you track. Tying this together with mobile rankings lets you see if your site’s mobile device compatibility may be affecting how you rank.

Local rankings

Last, but certainly not least, we completed a lot of the work to support Local Rankings in January of 2015. This robust addition offers the capability to not only track your rankings nationally, but also see how Google rankings appear in specific areas within a country. If location matters for your business, this feature can really help you understand and measure your local SEO visibility.

Page optimization

In 2015 we completely revamped our on-page optimization section of Moz Analytics, offering more accurate scores, updated advice, real-world usage examples, and a more elegant and intuitive design.

Precise scores & better advice

We eliminated letter grades from Page Optimization reports in favor of numerical scores. Scores of 0–100 are more precise than letter grades, and are more universally understood. We also updated relative weighting of page optimization criteria and incorporated updated advice from top SEOs to provide clear, relevant, practical optimization suggestions.

Improved workflow

We also made some big improvements to the on-page optimization workflow, adding a brand new page for you to track, monitor, and report on just the pages that you are actively optimizing. We’ve also improved our optimization suggestions, and put them into a separate Discover tab.

Other notable improvements

Multi-user support

We released our first version of Multiseat this past summer, which allows you to create extra logins and share access to your Moz Pro account with your team or clients. This was our most requested feature ever, and a feature we were keen to build for a long time. Multiseat turned out to be a surprisingly complex project, and required a coordinated effort across a bunch of teams to build out the infrastructure and make this feature a reality.

Improvements to campaign insights

Campaign insights highlight meaningful changes, help you quickly identify issues, and uncover opportunities to improve a site you’re actively optimizing. On top of significant performance improvements, we added new insights, a cleaner, more readable style, and even the ability to export insights to Trello.

New Pro homepage

This simplified page makes it easier to find and access the tools and services included with your Pro subscription.

Lots and lots of other updates and fixes

If you are interested in all of the details, we added a What’s New page with a more detailed chronology of updates, both big and small.

Moz Pro focus for 2016

2016 is the year that Moz Pro refocuses completely on SEO. We’ve diverted our focus in the past, adding peripherally relevant features to Moz Pro, only to find that customers didn’t value them and that we’d spread ourselves too thin.

As a company, Moz has honed its strategy, breaking into smaller teams that can each maniacally focus on the primary needs of their customers. This means that our very driven and talented Moz Pro product and engineering teams will get to focus their time, energy, and ingenuity in these areas:

• Rank Tracking
• Keyword research
• Site audits and optimization
• Link analysis and acquisition
• Great workflow to tie these together

As always, we will strive to provide the best data and metrics possible to help you evaluate, understand, and improve your search engine presence.

A sneak peek at some upcoming releases and improvements

I’m excited to share some of what we have in store for 2016! Our talented engineers, product managers, and SEO experts, along with some exceptionally helpful customers, have collaborated to dream up some big things for the coming year. Expect powerful new data sets, more intuitive workflows, and big improvements to core parts of the Pro subscription. Here’s a preview some of the big things coming your way in the next few months.

Keyword Explorer

This audacious effort has been some time in the making, and a significant passion project for Rand. We’re really looking to make this keyword research tool stand out in the market, so while we already have a working version, we’re still vetting it with our beta testers and adding the final touches so that it can be as powerful and easy to use as possible.

Rand shared a sneak peek at the tool a short while back:

Making progress every day on our new Keyword Explorer. Should be beta testing soon & launching in Q1. pic.twitter.com/sRJNImCoCf

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 8, 2016

Rankings history, advanced filtering, and snappier data

At its face, unlimited rankings history doesn’t sound that groundbreaking. That’s because it isn’t. It’s a feature we’ve wanted to offer for some time, but couldn’t due to the limitations of our application’s architecture. Those limitations are history. We’ve invested in a completely redesigned, highly scalable infrastructure that allows us to unleash the entire history of your data, and make it viewable, manipulable, filterable, exportable, and much faster to load.

This will also allow us to build in some more powerful features in the near future, making rankings much more usable if you track a lot of keywords. We are officially launching this update next week, but the engineering team was a little impatient — and so we quietly launched these improvements today. If you’re already a Moz Pro customer, go to your campaign rankings page to see these updates right now!

Related Topics

Along with keyword research, topical analysis and optimization has become an important focus for SEOs. Moz’s Data Science team has built out a great service to analyze and extract topics from any page on the Web. We will soon offer this service in Moz Analytics campaigns to help you discover topically-related keywords based on competitors in the SERP. Adding these keywords to your pages can help search engines identify your pages’ topic and intent, and help you rank for a broader set of queries.

Site crawl and auditing

This update is still in the very early stages, but expect to see some big improvements in site crawl performance and features in the first half of this year.

Bigger, more frequent, and more reliable link index updates

This is a significant priority for this year. We’ve already made some important progress, but there’s still much to do.

And much more

We plan to really beef things up this year. Some features are still in the planning phase, and some are just raw ideas at this point. We will be sharing updates frequently.

In conclusion: Thank you!

Moz is nothing without all of you, our amazing customers and community. Thank you for continuing to engage, be critical, send praise, divulge your best tactics, share lessons from defeats, help strangers, and make new friends. Thank you for being transparent, authentic, generous, fun, empathetic, and exceptional. We will always strive to do the same.

PS: Please keep letting us know what you need

One more thing before I sign off — please, continue to share your feature requests and frustrations with us so we can improve Moz Pro and build the things you need most.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by annboyles

As many of you — particularly our friends in Iowa and New Hampshire — are keenly aware, the height of the US presidential election season is upon us. In recent years, social media has had an increasingly profound impact on campaigns and election conversations, with candidates and their supporters (and detractors) taking to Twitter in droves. Here at Moz, we’re seizing the opportunity to examine the Twitter accounts of candidates seeking the highest office in the US to see what insights we can discover by sifting through the data.

Over the next nine months, we’ll be putting our Twitter analytics tool, Followerwonk, to work on the presidential candidates: analyzing followers, tracking changes in followership around key moments in time, and sharing any other interesting tidbits we run into along the way.

Join us on the Moz Blog between now and the general election in November as we reveal insights on followership trends of the top-performing presidential candidates. You can also follow the data we’re tracking the current six top-performing candidates* in realtime by visiting their individual Followerwonk analysis report pages:

• Hillary Clinton
• Ted Cruz
• Marco Rubio
• Bernie Sanders
• Donald Trump
• John Kasich

*Top-performing candidates as measured by their finishing positions in the 2016 Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. This list will evolve with the election cycle.

Top states getting their political tweets on

Let’s dive in!

We wanted to identify the top 10 states where users were tweeting about each candidate during 24-hour periods surrounding the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary.

So, what’s the big deal with Iowa and New Hampshire?

We’re going to take a quick step back here for those of you who may not be familiar with these events to explain why they matter. The Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary are the first two electoral contests during the US presidential election cycle. It’s the first time real voters cast real votes to narrow the field of candidates hoping to become the next president. These events play a significant role in shaping the public conversation about which candidates will ultimately be best positioned to capture their party’s nomination.

We won’t dig into the debate on this forum about whether either the Iowa Caucus or New Hampshire primary should be as influential as they are — plenty of other blogs and media outlets have that covered. But, there’s no denying they play an important role in setting the tone for the electoral contests still to come.

Which states were a-twitter on Twitter?

Back to our original question: Which states tweeted the most about the candidates during the first two electoral contests? To capture this, we examined all tweets mentioning the candidates in the Twitter Sample Stream and used Followerwonk’s location resolution algorithm to determine which US states were most represented in users’ Twitter bios. We then normalized results based on state population size. It’s worth noting that we used the locations from Twitter bios, which cannot always be resolved accurately. That said, we think it paints an interesting picture.

Top states tweeting during the Iowa caucus

Top states tweeting during the New Hampshire primary

Not surprisingly, you’ll see that the US capital, Washington, DC, is a hotbed of political activity on Twitter, ranking as the #1 location for tweets mentioning candidates during both the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. Other states with highly active political tweeters include Nevada, Iowa (which appeared on every candidate’s top 10 list for the Iowa Caucus), New Hampshire, and New York, which appeared on every candidate’s top 10 list for the New Hampshire primary.

Do political party patterns reflect voting patterns?

When reviewing the most active states broken down by candidates, we wanted to see if the political party patterns reflected how citizens of those states voted in the most recent 2012 presidential election. In other words: in the early 2016 contests, did GOP candidates generally see the most activity from “red” states (traditionally Republican-voting) and Democratic candidates from “blue” states (traditionally Democratic-voting)? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

For Democratic candidates, the answer is generally yes: only one of Sanders’s top 10 states surrounding the Iowa Caucus (Montana) and the New Hampshire primary (Indiana) was a red state in 2012, and only two of Clinton’s top 10 states for the Iowa Caucus (Alaska and Indiana) and New Hampshire primary (Indiana and Tennessee) were red states in 2012.

But for Republicans it was not as clear cut. Only two states (Alaska and South Carolina) on Rubio’s Iowa Caucus top 10 list, and only four states on both Trump’s list (Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina) and Kasich’s list (Nebraska, Louisiana, Arizona, and Oklahoma) were decidedly red states in 2012. In fact, Ted Cruz was the only candidate to net a majority of decidedly 2012 red states in his 2016 Iowa Caucus top 10 list. Results from the New Hampshire primary were fairly similar, although this time around both Trump and Cruz netted 50 percent decidedly red states on their top 10 lists, while Rubio and Kasich had closer to 30 percent decidedly red states on their lists.

So why the skew in data? We suspect it’s likely due to the fact that Twitter’s overall user base tends to have more liberal leanings; data suggests more Twitter users identify as Democrats than Republicans.

Is a Twitter bio worth a thousand words?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we wanted to create pictures of who follows each candidate. So we generated word clouds based on the most frequently used one-word and two-word phrases in the Twitter bios of each candidate’s followers.

For the GOP candidates, some commonalities and divergences exist. For example, everyone has the word “love” as the #1 word used in their followers’ Twitter bios, but only Trump’s does not have “conservative” as a close second. In fact, “conservative” does not appear anywhere in Trump’s one-word follower word cloud. And while “business” appears in every GOP candidate’s one-word follower word clouds, only for Trump does it rank in the top five.

Trump one-word bio word cloud

Cruz one-word bio word cloud

Rubio one-word bio word cloud

Kasich one-word bio word cloud

Then there’s the prominence of religious words in the bios of people following GOP candidates. For Cruz and Rubio, the word “God” comes in at #5 and #7, and “Christian” at #7 and #9, respectively. According to Iowa Caucus entrance polls, 64 percent of Republican caucus-goers were evangelical Christians, which may help explain Cruz’s first-place finish and Rubio’s better-than-expected third-place finish in nation’s first presidential electoral contest of 2016.

Out of all of the top six presidential candidates, only Kasich’s one-word bio word cloud features the name of a state (Ohio, the state of which he is governor). This suggests that, prior to his New Hampshire primary second-place finish, many of his followers may have been from Ohio. Now that he’s made more of a splash on the national stage, this may change as he gains more followers from around the country.

When we looked at two-word bio clouds, we found both the expected and unexpected. For instance, the words “real estate” ranked in the top two phrases for (not surprisingly) Trump, but also for Hillary Clinton and John Kasich, which we didn’t expect to be featured so prominently.

Trump two-word bio word cloud

Clinton two-word bio word cloud

Kasich two-word bio word cloud

Bernie Sanders’ two-word bio cloud boasts a number of phrases one might associate with a more youthful follower base, including “video games,” “pop culture,” “grad student,” “state university,” and “college student.” Voting data suggests Sanders’ Twitter followers reflect those supporting him electorally: according to both Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary exit polls, a whopping 84 percent of Democrats under the age of 30 voted for Sanders. It’s also worth noting that Sanders’s two-word bio cloud was the only one to feature the candidate’s name, suggesting that his followers are sufficiently interested in him to place his name in their own Twitter bio.

Sanders two-word bio word cloud

How candidates tweet: Retweets vs. original content

For most candidates (Clinton, Kasich, Rubio, and Sanders), around 30 percent of their total tweets are actually retweets. Ted Cruz, however, is an enthusiastic retweeter: at 65.5 percent, the majority of his tweets are retweets. Donald Trump is on the other end of the spectrum, preferring to generate original content: his retweet percentage is only 5.5 percent.

Battle of the sexes

What insights can we glean from the gender breakdown of each candidate’s followers? Turns out, nothing too revolutionary. Followerwonk’s gender ratio analysis produced results falling roughly in line with what one would expect from the demographic breakdown of the larger Republican and Democratic electorates. The Pew Research Center has found that, in the American electorate as a whole, women lean Democratic by 52 percent vs. 36 percent Republican, while men are roughly evenly divided at 44 percent Democratic, 43 percent Republican.

In Followerwonk’s gender analysis, we uncovered similar findings: the followers of the Republican candidates tended to skew more male (anywhere from 62–68 percent of gender-determined followers), while the followers of the Democratic candidates were more evenly divided between men and women (women made up 48–52 percent of gender-determined followers). As Twitter’s overall user base has a greater percentage of men, this aligns closely with the Pew results.

It should be noted that a significant proportion of each candidate’s follower base falls under “undetermined” — that is, Followerwonk is unable to determine their gender — but the results are still illuminating. For instance, Clinton is the only candidate with a larger percentage of female followers.

Gender breakdown of Trump followers

Gender breakdown of Rubio followers

Gender breakdown of Cruz followers

Gender breakdown of Kasich followers

Gender breakdown of Sanders followers

Gender breakdown of Clinton followers

It’s all in the timing

Most candidates received the bumps in followership you would expect from greater visibility that comes with the debates and the Iowa Caucus: Democratic candidates saw a spike in new followers around January 17 and February 4 (the most recent Democratic debates), whereas Republican candidates saw similar spikes around January 28 and February 6 (the most recent Republican debates). Additionally, all candidates increased their follower base around February 1, 2016: the Iowa Caucus (and, generally to a lesser extent, the New Hampshire primary on February 9). Sometimes candidates saw spikes when the opposite party debated, such as Hillary Clinton, who experienced a modest uptick (14,050 new followers) around the Republican debate on January 28.

Clinton follower change chart

While Sanders hasn’t, on the whole, been gaining as many new followers as Clinton on a daily basis, his spikes on the dates of the Democratic debates, the Iowa Caucus, and the New Hampshire primary were much higher: 23,647 to Clinton’s 16,979 for the January 17 Democratic debate, 25,544 to Clinton’s 9,341 for the February 4 Democratic debate, 30,592 to Clinton’s 16,613 on the Iowa Caucus, and 17,529 to Clinton’s 11,396 for the New Hampshire primary. This may be because, while most people are already familiar with Clinton, more are finding out about Sanders during these major events.

Sanders follower change chart

If you thought people on Twitter would be turned off by a candidate eschewing a debate, you’d be mistaken. In fact, Trump saw a significant jump in followers (41,948) immediately following his announcement that he would not participate in the January 28, 2016 GOP presidential debate hosted by FOX News. Indeed, while Cruz and Rubio (the two largest competitors to Trump during the Iowa Caucus) saw their largest increases in new followers after that contest, Trump’s largest increase was around the date of the Republican debate he did not attend. Even his smallest recent bump in followers for the February 6 Republican debate (17,768 new followers), however, was still larger than either Cruz’s or Rubio’s largest spikes for the Iowa Caucus (11,599 and 17,342 respectively).

Prior to the New Hampshire primary, Kasich’s largest bump in new followers occurred after the February 6 debate. Kasich’s biggest spike ever, however, came following his second place finish in the New Hampshire primary: in the day leading up to, of, and following the primary, he’s had a nearly 4.5 percent net increase in followers. Compare that to Cruz and Rubio (finishing 3rd and 5th respectively), who both experienced a less than 1 percent increase in followership during the same period. Trump, as the first place finisher, saw his biggest follower increase since the January 28 Republican debate, gaining more than 35,000 new followers.

Trump follower change chart

Rubio follower change chart

Cruz follower change chart

Kasich follower change chart

What’s next?

If you enjoy nerding out on this data as much as we do, check back with the Moz Blog between now and the general election in November, where we’ll regularly report on more of our analysis and findings. You can also follow Followerwonk on Twitter, where we’ll share interesting nuggets and stats we uncover along the way.

In the meantime, let us know any interesting trends you’re seeing with political candidates and issues on Twitter. Maybe you’re using Followerwonk or other social media analysis tools to track candidates for local office in your hometown or to keep a pulse on hot political elections and referendums internationally. Feel free to share your insights in the comments — we’d love to hear about them!

Special shout out to Marc Mims, whose mad developer skillz brought us all this juicy data, and to Angela Cherry, whose obsession with politics meant she couldn’t resist co-authoring this post.

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